Fugitive Tax Protester To Come Back For Trial

A Lake Mary man caught in Pennsylvania after 20 months on the run was ordered held without bail Wednesday so he can be returned to Orlando for trial on tax and weapons charges.

During a hearing in Erie, Pa., Grant McEwan, 60, acknowledged his identity to U.S. Magistrate Susan Paradise Baxter and agreed to return to Florida.

McEwan was arrested Tuesday night by FBI agents and Pennsylvania state troopers while plowing a field in Tionesta, about 70 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, said Ed Bodigheimer, an FBI supervisor in Orlando.

Bodigheimer said McEwan was living near his brother-in-law. Florida marriage and driving records show that his wife, Gerri, is from Pennsylvania.

The collection agency owner was thought to have lived in the state for several months. FBI spokesman Bill Crowley in Pittsburgh said McEwan had identification in the names Gene Skenp and Gene Skemp.

McEwan was arrested in November 1994 and charged with filing a bogus $1.1 million lien against the government in protest of the income tax system. That same month he had threatened to form a citizens militia and take over a Longwood IRS office.

He also was charged with failure to pay taxes and illegally possessing a machine gun and a silencer.

Two weeks before his trial was to begin, McEwan stunned his lawyers by disappearing from a cruise ship docked in Key West. His wife found a note in their cabin saying he felt persecuted by a corrupt government.

''I haven't had any contact with him,'' attorney Lowell Becraft of Huntsville, Ala., said Wednesday. ''I heard rumors he was in Costa Rica.''

McEwan is a former U.S. Marine, bail bondsman and a political gadfly who criticized Seminole County's Yankee Lake land purchase in the 1980s. In 1991, he helped publish a book accusing former President George Bush and his family of helping arm Nazis during World War II and smuggling drugs in recent years.